Utilitarianism Wins Outright Part 35: An Argument For Consequentialism
The fool says in their heart 'there is no (true) consequentialist theory'
For those of you who, unlike the average Bentham’s bulldog reader, are uncultured and ignorant — the subtitle is a reference to this.
Ethics must start with either seemingly plausible judgment about specific cases or about principles. Thus, like many others, this argument for consequentialism will appeal to two plausible principles.
Do what god says, not because he said it, but if he said that you should do it then that means that you in fact should do it because he knows best (dwgsnbhsibihstysditmtyifsdibhkb for short)1: If a perfectly moral and all-knowing being would want you to take some action, you should take that action.
The preferences of a perfectly moral being would obey completeness, transitivity, continuity, and independence.
From this, we can derive
3. Consequentialism: One should act in ways which produce the best consequences.
The first principle is very plausible — the notion that god would hope you act wrongly is a bizarre one. If people should hope you should do something, then in turn you should hope you should do it, and you should certainly do what you should hope you’d do.
The second principle, and in turn the ways in which it entails consequentialism, were expanded upon here. Any consistent agent who meets the four criteria that were set can be modeled as maximizing for some consequentialist function. This also requires abandoning agent-relative reasons as a result of dwgsnbhsibihstysditmtyifsdibhkb, for a third party’s hopes are not sensitive to your agent-relative reasons. For example, when deciding whether you should kill one to prevent five killings, they must compare the weight of the competing agent-relative reasons on both sides.
As long as the third party’s preferences for states of affairs in which agents take particular actions rather than other actions meets the axioms previously described, it must be able to evaluate between any two states of affairs and choose which one is better. Not only that, it must describe how much better it is.
Note a relevant caveat: this is a very, very modest form of consequentialism. It merely requires holding that there is some function for evaluating world states and that we maximize the value of those world states. It does not require holding, for example, that right violations matter no less than non-rights violations. One could hold that violating rights is especially bad, while remaining a consequentialist. Thus, one could still hold the judgment about the organ harvesting case, they’d just have to think a murder is worse than several deaths.
Very pithy
I don't understand why this proves that "state of affairs" consequentialism is true? Say I believe we should evaluate morality on an act-by-act basis, where certain types of acts like murder, assault, theft, etc. are verboten.
This is "complete" - when given a list of acts for a person to do, a moral being would look at the kind of act, determine if it falles into a category. If it does, then it is prohibited. If it does not, then we don't care.
It's transitive - if we look at acts A, B, and C, then we can say that if A is murder, B is assault, and C is theft, that Murder is always worse then assault is always worse then theft, and thus Murder is alwasy worse then theft as an act.
It also seems to, technically, be complete. That's because you aren't assigning "probabilities" at all. An act either is or is not murder, assault, theft, etc. So sure perhaps a 42% chance of assault is outweighed by a 100% chance of theft, but you will never actually get a "42% chance of assault" (though presumably committing 100 thefts is worse then 42 assaults)
It is also independent for substatially the same reason.
So a perfectly moral being looking at this acts based view would fall under your perview and not be a consequentialist?